Every Country, Same Excuse: On Mexico and the Age-Verification Playbook

Mexico is reportedly looking at social media and AI regulations aimed at protecting kids online. Age verification, possibly biometric, possibly tied to a digital ID. I read through a Reddit thread on it this morning with my second coffee, and the whole time I had this nagging sense of déjà vu.

We’ve been here. Australia passed its under-16 social media ban last year. The UK has its Online Safety Act. The EU is fiddling with age verification too. Different governments, different politics, remarkably similar solutions arriving at remarkably similar times. One commenter in that thread asked, in Spanish, whether there’s someone above all these politicians giving the orders. I don’t think it’s quite that tidy, but I understand the impulse to ask.

Here’s the thing I keep circling back to: the goal, protecting kids from genuinely harmful platform design, is one I actually support. I’ve watched my own teenage daughter navigate Instagram and TikTok, and the algorithms are not built with her wellbeing in mind. They’re built to keep her scrolling. That’s not a conspiracy, that’s the business model. So when people wave away child safety concerns as pure pretext, I think they’re being too cute about it. The concerns are real.

But the mechanism matters enormously, and this is where I get twitchy. Face scans. Digital ID tied to your phone number. A verification system that, once built, works just as well for tracking adults who’ve said something unflattering about the government as it does for keeping a twelve-year-old off Snapchat. Someone in that thread put it plainly: the more countries adopt this, the harder it becomes to resist globally. That’s not paranoia, that’s just how infrastructure works. You build the surveillance pipe for one stated purpose, and it sits there, fully capable of other purposes, forever.

I don’t know how you solve the actual problem, kids being harmed by addictive platform design, without building something that could also be turned against everyone else. That tension doesn’t resolve neatly, and I’m suspicious of anyone who tells me it does, on either side of the argument.

What strikes me about the Mexico case specifically is a comment about the cartels. If a government with serious corruption problems and a military presence in daily life starts demanding biometric compliance to access basic communication, who benefits when people look for ways around it? Probably not the people the policy claims to protect.

Locally, our own version of this rolled out with a fair bit less drama than expected, mostly because nobody’s quite worked out how enforcement will actually function. Platforms self-policing age verification with technology that barely works reliably for anything else. I’d bet money the loopholes get found faster than the protections do.

I don’t have a tidy answer here. I want platforms held to account for design choices that hurt kids. I also don’t want a global rollout of biometric ID infrastructure justified by that harm, then quietly repurposed the moment it’s useful for something else. Both things are true, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise just to land on a neat closing line.